Product Description The Treo™ 650 smartphone from palmOne makes it easier than ever to stay connected. It simplifies your life by combining a compact mobile phone with email,3 an organizer, messaging, and web access.3 There’s also Bluetooth® technology so you can connect wirelessly to other Bluetooth devices. Not to mention an MP3 player,2 a digital camera that captures video, and a vibrant color screen that brings everything to life – all in a device that’s still small enough to fit in your pocket. Seems like Treo smartphones just keep getting smarter. The Treo 650 smartphone looks and feels just like a phone, but it’s so much more. Carry thousands of business and personal phone numbers with you, and dial any of them by name from your contacts list. Or enter a name or number on the QWERTY keyboard. There’s even an on-screen dial pad. speakerphone, speed dial, conference calling, call history, and caller ID make managing all your calls that much easier. Available as a dual-band digital CDMA phone, and as a GSM quad-band world phone. .com The PalmOne Treo 650 boasts all the legendary features of the venerable Treo 600, plus a whole lot more. Now with Bluetooth, a higher resolution screen, a removable battery, and an improved keyboard, the Treo 650 is once again on the cutting edge of Smartphone technology. It offers all the functionality of a high-end Palm OS-powered PDA, a cell phone and a VGA camera. Simply put, it's the ultimate mobile office companion.Design Click the image to get a closer look at the Treo 650's features. Under the hood, the Treo 650 features Palm OS 5.4, 32MB of RAM (23MB available for end user storage), and an Intel PXA270 312 MHz processor. The design retains the same popular form factor as the Treo 600 with a few subtle, yet significant, changes. The unit's screen has been dramatically enhanced to support 320 x 320 resolution and the full QWERTY keypad has been redesigned for greater ease of use. The top of the unit features an expansion card slot for SD and MMC-based memory and expansion cards. There's also an infrared port here for line of sight data transfers, as well as a handy switch for turning off the phone's ringer. A five-way navigator controls most of the phone's menus and operating system functions, while quick application buttons on either side of the navigator get you to your favorite applications in a snap. The left side of the unit features a volume up/down toggle plus a handy user-customizable button that can be assigned to any phone or PDA function. The rear of the Treo 650 houses a loudspeaker, as well as the VGA (640x480) camera unit. A touchscreen stylus can be tucked away on the right side of the phone. Meanwhile, a combined charging, data, and accessory attachment port is housed on the bottom of the unit, as is a standard 2.5 mm stereo headset jack.Calling and PDA Features All the of the Treo 650's phone and PDA functions are designed to provide an integrated, seamless experience. For instance, you can type in the name or initials of a contact on the keypad to dial them. Or, use the touchscreen and stylus to copy information from an email and quickly paste it into another email or text message. All of the latest phone features folks expect are built-in, too, like a handsfree speakerphone, polyphonic ringtones, a vibrate mode and picture caller ID. The capacity of the unit's address book is only limited by the amount of internal and expansion memory available. Use the Treo 650's Bluetooth capability to wirelessly sync your contacts with your PC or Mac (yes, Mac!). Headsets, car kits and other wireless peripherals can also be paired with the unit via Bluetooth. The Treo 650 is also a fully functional Palm OS device. That means that a huge library of applications, from spreadsheets to word processors to games, can be added to the Treo 650. It's easy to perform multiple tasks like checking your calendar while talking on the phone or dialing calls directly from your contacts list. Familiar Palm OS software ships with the handset including calendar, calculator, clock, contacts, memo, and task management applications. Real Player for video and MP3 playback, VersaMail email client, and DataViz Documents to Go for mobile access to spreadsheets and text documents, are also included. The unit's memory expansion slot allows you to transfer music, photos, and video from your desktop. Or, use it to load additional games and applications. Click the image to see the Treo 650 in action. Messaging and Internet The device fully supports SMS and MMS messaging for rapid exchange of pictures, text and video via Sprint's instant messaging system. Other Sprint PCS Vision services are also supported, such as mobile email, web browsing and instant messaging. Sprint's PCS Business Connection service, which is fully compatible with the Treo 650, gives you secure, remote, real-time access to Microsoft Outlook Exchange-- including email messages and attachments, calendar, business directory and personal contacts. You can also respond to meeting requests, access documents stored on your desktop PC, and view email from POP3 and IMAP4-based email accounts, including Sprint PCS Mail, Yahoo!, Earthlink and more.Imaging and Entertainment The Treo 650's built-in camera features a 2x zoom, a flash and a self portrait mirror. While the camera is great for taking stills, it can also function as a camcorder, allowing you to capture MPEG4 video to the unit's memory. The device ships with two games, Zap! 2016 and Handmark Solitaire, and many more Palm-based games are available. As mentioned, the device ships with Real Player, so you can use your Treo 650 as a portable MP3 and video player. Keep your tunes loaded on a memory card and you're ready to go with stereo sound wherever you roam.Vital Statistics The PalmOne Treo 650 weighs 6.30 ounces and measures 4.40 x 2.30 x .90 inches. Its lithium-ion battery is rated at up to 5 hours of digital talk time, and up to 300 hours of digital standby time. It runs on the CDMA 800/CDMA 1900 frequencies. The phone comes with a one year limited warranty.What's in the Box Treo 650 handset, lithium-ion battery, USB HotSync cable, headset, AC charger, user manual, software CD-ROM.
A**G
PalmOne ROM update fixes flaws
I've had the Treo 650 for months, and agree with most other raters that it had problems. It reset spontaneously, had 50% less usable memory than the 600 and the phone quality was not as good. Palmone has updated the ROM now and fixed all these problems. My usable memory went from 5 mb to almost 11mb, and the phone is now completely stable. No need for reservations anymore. The ROM update is not yet available for Cingular, but will be, I suppose, eventually.
F**T
Customer Service Nightmare DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME!
Have you ever noticed that you can always talk to a sales person but you always have to wait for a customer serivce person? The same should be true of activation, but my expereicne was so bad I would rather return the phone than take the chance that I might someday need customer service.I am a 'power' phone user--the kind of user companies want becuase I use so many minutes. I currently use ATT. I want to switch. Why? Because I cant get a decent signal between my home and work despite living in a major metropolitan area. So I decided to take a chance with Sprint.OK, so I buy the Sprint via Amazon and I finally receive it today. I charge the phone and call the Sprint number for activation. First, you have to enter a 13 digit number that can be found in teeny-tiny print inside the phone. Supposedly it works by voice recognition, but in my case, it gave up and connected me to a customer service agent. The agent asks for my SSN and surprise, according to their computer I had an account with them eight years ago which had a $29.00 balance. I was told that I need to pay it before I can activate. I explain that I dont recall ever having a sprint phone, but anything is possible since I am a business owner and I may have had a phone for an employee back then. Of course, my explanation didnt matter and they transferred me to collections. Before you can speak to a collections agent, you have to enter your 10 digit PCS number--now in my case I dont have a number, so I was trapped in voice mail hell. I entered 10 zeroes and eventually after sitting in a queue I managed to reach a human being. The agent asks me for my SSN again, pulls up my account, at which time, I said, I will pay the $29.00 under protest and contest it later. The agent then said, "never mind you'll have to call back since our system is down." I said I would rather wait, or have you call me since otherwise I will have to go thru the queue again. I was told I could wait, and was put on hold. The agent evenutally returns and says he is sorry but I'll have to call back. I ask for a supervisor. First the agent says no supervisor is availalbe and I said I'll wait for one. I had to wait about 30 seconds. A woman answers saying she is the superivsor and "can I help you?" I said "I have been on the phone close to 30 minutes now and." Before I could complete the sentence, she says their system is down, she cant help me, and hangs up on me. I swear I never raised my voice.I call the main activation number again. after going tru the same dysfunctional voice recognition, I get a live agent. I explain the problem and the agent says the system is working again and she will trnasfer me to collections. Again I cant enter the PCS number, but eventually I get into a queue and 3 minutes later I am speaking to a new agent in collections. I offer to pay my bill, and then I am told "There is a $5.00 fee to pay by phone!" I said, I am sorry, its bad enough you are making me pay for a charge I am contesting that is eight years old and I will not pay $5.00 for the privilege of paying a $29.00 bill. I asked how I go about paying otherwise, and was put on hold. The agent returned and said "never mind" he will waive the $5.00 charge. How considerate. OK, so now I pay, and then I ask to be transferred back to activation. He says sure, and proceeds to disconnect me, presumably by accident.Well, being persistent, and excited about playing with a new gadget, I called activation a third time. I didnt even bother trying to use the voice recogntion, so I entered the teeny-tiny 13 digit number. Confident that I am finally going to get activated, I put my phone on speaker and waited. Guess what? I was disconnected again! By this time I'm thinking that my ATT phone isnt so bad after all, but being a glutton for punishment, I called a fourth time. This time I did eventually reach an activation agent at which time I was informed that their system doesnt show posted payments for twelve hours! "Please call back."I am done calling Sprint. I intend to return my phone to Amazon tomorrow. I would rather use two cans and a string than have to put up with another customer service nightmare.I hope enough of you reading this will choose another carrier, and maybe Sprint will realize that it's time to fix its broken system.
J**T
Decent Product - HORRIBLE support from Amazon/Sprint
I have used the handspring deveices and loved the Treo 300. Still think that design is superior if you have to carry around a brick to talk on. The 600 and 650 series was a nice change. The 650 addresses the limitations and flaws of the 600.There are still a lot of BUGS on this device. The reviewer who states that it retarts frequently is not kidding. How can you be used to that chaos? I am a Mac user so am not used to crashes, maybe that is it. This 650 device crashes when I check mail each time. The speakerphone drops in and out and the keys are now so close together typing is impossible for anyone who can palm a basketball.I have called Sprint and they said the mail crashes it's on my server. Also when dding contacts it crashes. Each function it seems to have crashed at leasty once.Well, Blackberry works fine on my server and there are not many options to the mail management so something is wrong with the application. Updates are not easy unless you have the correct cable.[...]
S**T
Screen, RAM, usability, and Bluetooth stack all lacking
I "upgraded" from a Tungsten T3 and am still not sure if I can handle the much smaller screen, tiny RAM cache, and missing buttons.I too have suffered several spontaneous reboots in the past 6 days of ownership. Many of these (and the reliability complaints in other reviews) can probably be attributed to the drastic changes made to the memory configuration. The 650 basically has an internal memory card that provides most of it's main memory. This is great for nonvolatility (such as when changing batteries), but bad for slowness and incompatibility problems for many existing programs. To help with the slowness, there is a small amount (10 MB) of real RAM, but that isn't enough for many applications such as games and those that use a lot of data. Incidentally, the Tungsten T5 has been panned for the same problem. I bought a 1GB SD card, so I was able to install all the applications from my old PDA; I just couldn't get some of them to run.This all manifests itself in OS crashes. You know it's happened when the device inexplicably starts rebooting itself. I'm curious why a company so obsessed with backward compatibility made a change that breaks so many programs (such as StreetFinder), and who responds with the comment that we should contact each program's manufacturer to see if they'll rewrite their software just to work with the 650. Sheesh!That being said, my main complaint is that that the Treo's Bluetooth stack is very minimal at best. It only supports the hands-free profile. Even though the documentation says "headset" in many places, it doesn't truly support headsets for MP3s, Audible books, and the like. This fact is buried on page 69 of the manual: "Please note, however, that you cannot use a headset with Bluetooth wireless technology to listen to MP3 files". After downloading the Bluetooth car kit patch, I am able to use the phone hands-free in my car, but I'm curious why a brand new device needed a patch already for a fairly mature/stable technology.My last big complaint is that they took away so many of the usability features that I'd gotten used-to on my last Palm. They took away many of the hardware buttons, which make many of the classic games now unplayable. With the T3, I had 5 buttons that I could customize, Now there are only 3 and one of those is really needed for the phone, so there are really only 2 available. They also took away the wake-up functionality of the buttons; you now have to press the power-on button, wait for the device to wake up, and then press one of the buttons. Maybe a future patch will enable each of the keyboard keys to be a button. And they took away the always-present toolbar. This was probably due to optimizations with the smaller screen, but I'd like to be able to make the choice. With the loss of the toolbar, you lose the drop down list of past applications and only have sporadic access to the clock, a Bluetooth control icon, and a few other icons.The bottom line is that many, many concessions were made to the PDA functionality in order to cram the phone features in. If having everything in one device is very important to you, then this probably isn't a bad choice. But if you consider yourself a PDA power-user, you're probably better off going with a real PDA and a real phone. If you're mostly interested in games and such, the N-Gage or Zodiac devices would probably meet your needs better. The N-Gage even has a phone.
Trustpilot
1 month ago
2 weeks ago
